Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino's life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin.

The letters are filled with insights about Calvino's writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino's Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance.

This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work.

Review

"Acclaimed Italian author Calvino (1923  1985) is best known for his fables, stories, and novels, including If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Yet he was also a book editor, journalist, and WWII Resistance fighter. This first English translation of 650 letters spanning the period from the war years until his death include Calvino's correspondence with writers Umberto Eco, Gore Vidal, Elsa Morante, and Primo Levi; directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini; composer Luciano Berio; as well as mentors, critics, and others. Elegant and generous, the letters reveal Calvino's insights on authorship ('the author... exists only in his works; outside them... he is an everyday guy, who is very careful not to Ã¢Â€Â˜identify' with an ideal character'), literature ('Romanticism, that great river of paradisiacal incontinence...'); the role of the critic; the influence of Roland Barthes; and tarot cards and comic strips on his work. The son of scientists, Calvino first studied agronomy, and his letters reflect these and other biographical details  his continuing sympathy toward the Italian Communist Party despite his defection in 1957, his move to Paris in 1967, and his comments on American, French, and Italian literature and society. In a letter to a journalist friend, he says that he'd like to teach 'a way of looking... a way of being in the world.' These letters show he succeeded." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review

"This collection, the first in English, gives voice and witness to a vibrant mind intensely engaged in the literary and political future of postwar Italy and the history of ideas. . . . McLaughlin's translation is award-winning; the extensive notes provide a model of masterful research. Irresistible for Calvino readers."--Library Journal

Review

"Italo Calvino's letters . . . provide . . . pleasure and surprise. . . . In them he shines as an editor of obvious brilliance and a writer of lavish gratitude towards those who appreciate his work."--Vivian Gornick, Prospect

Review

"[C]onsistently absorbing and suggestive. . . . [T]he chronicle not only of Calvino's intellectual development but of postwar Italy's. . . . The letters in this book deal with great subtlety, sophistication, and wit, and occasionally even a certain cynicism, with challenges that might have overburdened a less mercurial, multifarious, essentially sane spirit."--Jonathan Galassi, New York Review of Books

Review

"The image of Calvino as postmodernism's light-footed prince follows easily. But, behind that image, who was Calvino? The publication of a considerable selection of Calvino's letters affords an opportunity, or many opportunities, to ask that question anew."--Lawrence Norfolk, Wall Street Journal

Review

"Superbly translated by Martin McLaughlin, these letters place Calvino in the larger frame of 20th century Italy and provide a showcase for his refined and civil voice. . . . Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is a charming addition to the Planet Calvino--a place cluttered with sphinxes, chimeras, knights, spaceships and viscounts both cloven and whole."--Ian Thomson, Guardian

Review

[I]mpeccably translated and annotated. Ian Thomson - Guardian

Review

[A]ltogether fantastic. . . . Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is indispensable in its entirety, a treasure trove of timeless insight on literature and life. Robert Gordon - Literary Review

Review

The general reader will come away from the Letters admiring this skeptical, loyal, generous, industrious man, who gave the life of letters the dignity it so often seems to lack. Maria Popova - Brain Pickings

Review

It is impossible to overstate just how sublime and richly insightful Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is in its entirety. Adam Kirsch - Barnes and Noble Review

Review

Review

"[T]here is no writer alive who resembles . . . Calvino. So the appearance of a selection of Calvino's letters in English is a moment of happiness. . . . [T]hese letters offer a gorgeous portrait of Calvino in the midst of his own productivity: as an editor, a reader, a critic, an inventor of new literary forms. And they allow the reader to investigate the complicated background from which those strange forms emerged."--Adam Thirlwell, New Republic

Review

One of The Guardian Best Books of 2013, chosen by Pankaj Mishra

Selected for the SFG Gift Guide 2013

Synopsis

"Calvino liked to present an inscrutable face to the world, but this literally marvelous collection of letters shows him to have been gregarious, puckish, funny, combative, and, above all, wonderful company, and opens a new and fascinating perspective on one of the master writers of the twentieth century. Michael Wood and Martin McLaughlin have done Calvino, and us, a great and loving service."--John Banville, author of Ancient Light

"Italo Calvino was one of the most sparkling literary inventors and innovators of the twentieth century. He was also a highly astute mediator of the work of others and a pellucid purveyor of a subtly elaborated idea of literature. To have a generous selection of his letters in English, translated with great verve, represents a major addition to our knowledge of his work, offering countless precious glimpses of the gears and levers that operate the 'literature machine.'"--Robert S. C. Gordon, University of Cambridge

"These letters are invaluable. They are an important source for understanding the intellectual and historical context of Italo Calvino's writing and thought, and his relations with other writers. They are filled with irony and insights on a vast variety of interesting literary and cultural topics. And they are beautifully written--a literary achievement in themselves. This translation is a real achievement as well."--Lucia Re, University of California, Los Angeles

"This is an excellent translation."--Andrea Ciccarelli, Indiana University

About the Author

Michael Wood is professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University. His most recent books are Yeats and Violence and A Very Short Introduction to Film. Martin McLaughlin is the Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the translator of Calvino's Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, Into the War, and Why Read the Classics?, which won the John Florio Prize for translation. He is also cotranslator of Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics.